


Spinning Stage

by titianArchivist



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character studies, Community: homesmut, Drabble Collection, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Multi, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Sketches, Speedwrites, Titian throws her keyboard at the wall
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-18
Updated: 2013-02-18
Packaged: 2017-11-29 19:07:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/690419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/titianArchivist/pseuds/titianArchivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You'll see it: Everything you're sure of is up for change</i>
  <br/><i>We're all stuck on this spinning stage</i>
  <br/><i>Spinning around and round and round and round and round.</i>
</p>
<p>Drabbles, speedwrites, and short promptfic in the Homestuck fandom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Meenah <>/<3 Aranea, Quadrantflipping

**Author's Note:**

> From my [unrequited and one-sided reverse prompt thread](http://homesmut.dreamwidth.org/39135.html?thread=42631903#cmt42631903) on the Homesmut kink meme. Please feel free to head over there and leave me more prompts; there are already some really lovely ones there, but I'd like to have enough to keep me in writing warmups for a while!
> 
> Prompt:  
> "Meenah is up to her gills in flushed feelings for Aranea, who thinks it is clear they are much better pale. Meenah doesn't want to risk the only person she's ever been close to, so sort of vascilitates between red quadrants a little. Bonus if Meenah is really, for lack of a better word, a horny sort and frequently fantasizes about the bookworm and feels instantly bad about it."
> 
> If you're interested in the headcanon I reference at the end, it's [here](http://tatterdemalionamberite.tumblr.com/post/43176198198/lets-talk-about-captors-and-tentacle-wires).

It's been clear to you since you were both too young to know more about moirallegiance than the euphemistic tripe about cuddles and gentleness that you read in wrigglers' books – you've known forever, since you stormed out of the castle at some long-forgotten childhood slight and she held on to the beginnings of your horns and stroked your face, all tiny hands and strange noises, and you hovered for a moment of the edge of calm but then stormed right back in again and doubled some tealblood kid who got in your way over your fist – you've always known that Aranea Serket could never pacify you.

Tyrians thirst for moirallegiance, you're taught; the right conciliator can mean the difference between a thousand sweeps of peace and utter carnage. Be tame, they tell you, be humble. Find your moirail and learn to be taken in hand, learn to have the rumbling voice of something feral and darksome and pestilent shooshed over and stroked out of you. You tell them to glub off, of course, but there are times when even you tire of yourself, moments when you _want_ to... But every time your best friend comes to you all big-eyed and scared and trying so hard to act detached, as if she could will or reason away what she feels for you and - And you're terrified every time that if you don't fall into the pile with her, if you pull away too hard when she starts with the senseless, utterly unsoothing unraveling and retwining of your braids, that someday she'll succeed. You don't know what to ask of her, how to make this better, so you just bring her useless trinkets bought with stolen palace treasure and seethe, too proud to run your hands over your own face at night. Because you do pity her. You pity her when she talks until she forgets what she is trying to say under the avalanche of her own words; when she studies until she falls asleep in a pile of schoolfeedingwork on your bedroom floor; in the dragging interminable sweeps of the game when she has so much to offer but no one but you will give her the time of night. Yeah, you pity her, but when she starts to paint her lips blue and you stare at her mouth all goddamn day and all you want to do is smear -

Falling flushed for Aranea is like this: Wanting to stop her trying to fix you, stop her _trying_ at all just for a while, get her fussing papping hands pinned up in one of yours – and she lets you try, but – it doesn't matter that you go to pieces over the span of her hips, because she stills like she's halfway trying not to be here and even when you can get through to her body, it's never what you so want to give her. 

She keeps your secret, even when it could mean chaos and ruin and the end of empire. And you kill your friends because it is necessary - but you enjoy it because there is no one to stop you.

When you wake up after sweeps of death it's all infinitely worse, the body you no longer have somehow voracious after a hibernation it never went through and you crave her, you pun and leer and tug at the hem of her dress and make like it's all still a big joke but inside you're riddled with it, the swell of her arms as she tries to hold you and the elegant arch of her eyebrows and the unconscious upward swings of her chin while she talks that sweep her hair feather-thin over the slope of her shoulders... but still she's so sincerely, so cleanly pale for you, and you only ask a handful of times, when you're desperate; take very nearly her whole hand up your nook and kiss her throat; beg, just once, until she lets you get your mouth between her smooth full pearl-gray thighs.

You actually have a pale fling with Kankri, of all people, as though – as though everyone thinks so little of him that it doesn't count, somehow – since abandoning your kingdom you've gotten good at not thinking about things like this, shutting off when you break trust. You ball your fists up in his sweater and sob into the fabric, his short thick fingers shocked-gentle-hesitant along your horns, expecting nothing, hardly even caring, the perfect counterpoint to Aranea's calculated, demanding kneading into carefully researched pressure points, the frantic undercurrent every time of _need this to work, need you to be better for me_ – Kankri rambles on about privilege and responsibility and couldn't give a glub what you do as long as it doesn't make _him_ look bad, and it isn't perfect, but it helps. You don't even try to hide it from her – even without her senses in your head, it's pointless, she knows you – but still she acts like she doesn't see, and for all that she passes herself off as detached, mature, wiser than the rest of you these days, Serket will always deceive when it's convenient for her. You tell her every intimate detail of it just from spite, just to watch the ugly jealousy and desperate wounded pity smear across her sharp-nosed pretty little face. Oh, you know that deep at the very center of the intricate woven-folded self she's spun trying to be someone she can live with she is just like you, vicious and out of place and you pity her for it hot and all-encompassing. She lets you take her on the floor of your dead palace that night, her eyes on the pockets of shadow in the vault of the roof when her nook pulses around you, oceanic cerulean spreading over delicate tile in an uneven stain - lets you knowing you'll give in to her fruitless shooshing in the evening, too proud to apologize but too deeply lost in pity to ever refuse her, her smooth endless analyzing voice, her precise infuriating thin-boned hands. And you will stomp and fume at your worthless ragtag army and bridle for the fight...

By the time the the man with the blank white face comes to you and tells you what you have always known, you are wrath-simple, bloodshot, roiling, avaricious, deprived. You are a wolf raised among lambs, he tells you, forever ravenous but never taught the killing bite, sentenced by birth to slow starvation on a planet of bounty. And you go with him, easy, into another time.


	2. Eridan Ampora, character study

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A short bit of the inside of Eridan's head, on the meteor before Murderstuck.

You feel closest to her now in sleep.

Awake, the parched and dusty reclaimed air inside the meteor throws a veil between you and everything. It clogs your vocal folds until your speech comes out chopped off and mostly consonants, choked and bitter even when you try hard to be neutral, precise. And even when your love is close enough to touch - even then, the miserable mustardblood is always around, that strobing bicolored shimmer that he engulfs the both of them in whenever you approach, as if to protect her. You can't tell him how it backfires - how your saline-soaked capillaries, meant for the sea, conduct his static straight into your 'pan and throw your thoughts diagonal and arcwise, so that every insignificant glubbing reasonable thing you try to say, every apology emerges as a plea, every plea as a threat, until you stalk off tongue-tied and furious to the specimen room, to float and leech the crackling out.

You thought you were so close to being quit of this. An empty new universe clean of the angels' whispered snickering, the way it leached through your aural nerves while you slept. (When you fought the bastards, they at least had the decency to taunt you out loud, and you could scream back at them curses and Crosshair missiles, and for those vivid cacophonous moments you felt sane.) But no, you'll never be alone in your own 'pan, it's useless now, you'll never have deep clean water, silence, peace. Sure, none of the rest of them get to keep their minds to themselves either, it's your pathetic collective curse, from the rustblood's gloomy spirits all the way up to Fef and her ancestral lusus. But somehow it's not the same for them, is it? They never seem to suffer the way you do. If you asked - you won't, you're above that, you're not that desperate and never will be - none of them would say, "Oh, yeah, Eridan, me too! Just like you said, I can't remember a time when I haven't simultaneously wanted to hack off my earfins and sleep for eternity and slaughter everyone I can reach. Here's how I deal with that - I hope it works for you too!" On Alternia, you could have been culled for even asking.

And you still want to kill. You do. It doesn't matter anymore - never did - whether the idea is yours or was given to you by the guardian in the deep. It's become a part of your foundation, too diffused through you now to carve out: the hilltops' final, shuddering crumpling-in, the trees going rust-dark and shattering into breezeborne fragments, the exultant heaven-reaching toss of the waves. The wet choked thud as every breathing thing on land covers its ears and collapses. The welcoming twang of surface tension as you dive for the last time. The screaming... and the way it stops when the chill closes over you and the current sweeps you home. Oh, you still want it, but there's no more sea left for you to sink into when it's over, nothing more for your slaughter to save, and the Land of Wrath and Angels has left you utterly tired, a bit sick of death, and frankly half-convinced that the flying things' feathery whispers were right, that you couldn't pull it off, you'd die a humiliating death before even scoring your first kill. You're exhausted, you're done, like you'd somehow used up most of your thousands of allotted sweeps in the game; like your wick is trimmed and you're sputtering; your shoulders ache as if still bearing up under the ponderous crossbow, and you sink again and again and again into sleep.

If your 'pan must have visitors, they will be of your own choosing. You sleep through meetings and strategy sessions and asteroid repairs - sleep and enter Fef's realm, let the Horrorterors nest in the corners of your 'pan. Something about them feels like her, something wise and ancient, yet not fully formed. In their rumbling incomprehensible tongue you recognize the susurrant accent of your former moirail's lusus, long ago when you used to hear the echoes of Gl'bgolyb's encouragement in the heat of the hunt, praising your kills, promising to open her royal charge up to you, use their link to lace her dreams with pity, if only you brought her one more, one more, the indigo's great white whale, the little brownblooded boy's doe-eyed hoofbeast. You immerse yourself in the horrorterrors' element, dull your ears to your mutant-blooded friend's warnings, and let the icy flow of the void carry you where it will.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and summary text from [Land's End](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsDvOKPt4iA) by Patrick Wolf.


End file.
